Mr Consul-General, Dean of the University of Melbourne Law School, ladies and gentlemen:

It is a great pleasure to open this workshop on the Biological Weapons Convention.

I welcome our foreign visitors who have come from all over our region. I hope that your short stay in Australia is interesting and enjoyable.

This Workshop is co-hosted by the Australian and Indonesian Governments. I would like to acknowledge the support of the Government of Indonesia in helping us to make this event occur. This is one of an increasing number of cooperative endeavours by our two governments in areas of common security concern.

I also want to thank the Asia Pacific Centre for Military Law and the University of Melbourne for their support and for providing us with this venue. The Centre is a joint venture between the Law School and the Department of Defence that has been running for five years. A recent review of the Centre recommended that it extend its work into the area of disarmament and arms control, and this Workshop is the first such initiative.

The Australian Government has assessed the threat posed by the proliferation of Weapons of Mass destruction in our most recent statement on our security environment, Australia’s National Security – A Defence Update 2003. In this document we identified the proliferation of WMD as one of the major challenges to our international security.

Other challenges come from the rise of global terrorism and instances of internal instability in our region.

These challenges are inter-related. They are also ones that cannot be resolved by nations acting alone. They require joint and concerted effort.

There are increasing concerns about the possibility of terrorists acquiring WMD, including biological weapons. Removing the threat of terrorism, including bio-terrorism, is of vital importance to all of us in this region.

But again, the prevention of bio-terrorism and the proliferation of biological weapons cannot be assured by any one country acting in isolation.

Thus meetings of this type are of such importance.

We are glad to be able to play a role in supporting non-proliferation in our region. In the past year alone, the Australian government has hosted a ministerial-level Asia-Pacific Conference on Nuclear Safeguards and Security in Sydney. A key theme of the Conference was preventing nuclear and radiological terrorism, and the conference promoted regional cooperation to minimise this risk through adherence to the highest international nuclear safeguards and security standards.

Australia also hosted a meeting of countries participating in the Proliferation Security Initiative, the second time Australia has done so. This meeting increased the operational focus for the PSI, and examined ways to open PSI further to more practical involvement by other states particularly in this region.

In April we will host the 20^th Anniversary Plenary meeting of the Australia Group, a voluntary agreement which has proven to be highly successful in focussing efforts to limit the potential for sensitive chemical and biological materials to be misused.

And later this year Australia will host the third senior-level meeting of the Asian Export Control Policy dialogue.

Next year, Australia will chair the Wassenaar Arrangement in Vienna, which seeks to control transfers of conventional arms and sensitive technologies.

Countries in the Asia Pacific have signalled their strong support for global non-proliferation efforts through:

• the Chairman’s Statement on Non-Proliferation at the 11^th ASEAN Regional Forum Ministerial Meeting in July last year;
• undertakings in 2003 and 2004 in the APEC Leaders’ Declaration to strengthen national export controls;
• the Tokyo Declaration at the Japan-ASEAN Commemorative meeting;
• the Chair’s Statement from the ASEAN Regional Summit in Hanoi in October 2004, and in the Joint Statement of the 2004 Ministerial Meeting on strengthening of the IAEA safeguards system; and
• the Outcomes Statement from the Asia-Pacific Ministerial Nuclear Safeguards and Security Conference in Sydney in November last year.

These efforts have been significantly bolstered by the unanimous adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1540 last April, committing all states to adopting effective exports controls.

But the bedrock of our international response remains the non-proliferation treaties and these treaties were written in a very different world.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is now 35 years old. The BWC is almost 30 years old. And the Chemical Weapons Convention was developed in the late 1980s and finalised in 1992. If we are to successfully reduce the threat from these horrific weapons – whether biological, chemical, radiological or nuclear – we must work together to ensure the traditional regimes remain rigorous, effective, and relevant in the new circumstances of the twenty-first century.

It is sobering to realise how far a state like Libya, for example, was able to go in acquiring information, materials and equipment for its WMD programs before its government made the welcome decision to renounce these weapons.

A disturbing aspect of the Libyan case was the involvement of a well-organised proliferation network, without the overt assistance of a state, as the transmission mechanism between suppliers of material and customers for WMD.

Today we are particularly addressing the threat from biological weapons that may fall into the hands of non-state players – the growing and very real threat of bio-terrorism.

The threat is not only real but a growing one, because of the rapid advances in the biological sciences and bio-technology, and the widespread availability of this information and associated material. These trends have coincided with the emergence of non-state actors determined to seek weapons of mass effect to use against civilian populations.

We have seen recent misuse of biological materials to induce terror in the US with the anthrax attacks in 2001 and, in the mid-1990s, in Japan when the Aum Shinrikyo cult attempted to use biological agents before their more popularly-known attacks in Tokyo involving chemical agents. And we must remember the particular lessons that we learned from Iraq.

Iraq is an example of the challenges faced in detecting evidence of a BW program. Despite suspicions that Iraq possessed a BW program, the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) conducted inspections from 1991 in Iraq for four years without uncovering solid evidence (although by the mid-1990s, UNSCOM had uncovered solid evidence of procurement of growth media, fermenters and other requirements which had clearly been destined for Iraq’s BW program). Ultimately, it would be the August 1995 defection of LTGEN Hussein Kamal – primary director of Iraq’s WMD programs – which precipitated Iraq’s July 1995 declaration that it did indeed have a BW program. Iraq had spent several years developing, producing and weaponising a number of biological agents, and by the 1991 Gulf war, Iraq had weaponised anthrax, botulinum toxin and aflatoxin in R-400 aerial bombs, and also declared having filled 25 Al Husayn warheads with these BW agents.

Highlighting the dual-use dilemma, following the 1991 Gulf war Iraq’s primary BW agent production facility, Al Hakam (later destroyed by UNSCOM) switched to the production of legitimate agricultural products using the same equipment once used to produce BW agents.

Each country represented at this Workshop is a party to the Biological Weapons Convention. We have all agreed to be bound by its obligations and we share a common resolve to uphold its principles. However we also share a common burden to ensure that the BWC remains relevant and effectively inhibits the development of biological weapons.

Indeed, we are all on a steep learning curve as we grapple with the complexities of how we might raise the barriers to bio-terrorism and the proliferation of biological weapons in ways that do not hamper the growth and sharing of scientific knowledge and the global spread of beneficial advancing technologies. No one country has all the answers. So the workshop will seek to complement the Geneva program of work by considering the implementation of the various parts of the program from a regional perspective.

Unlike the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Biological Weapons convention has never had formal machinery for monitoring compliance. The Australian government strongly supported the development of a Protocol to strengthen the BWC. We worked vigorously in the negotiation process between 1995 and 2002 to develop a comprehensive protocol containing strong compliance measures that would reduce the opportunities for proliferation and offer substantive security benefits.

The failure of these efforts is a matter of record. While we are disappointed with this outcome, the Australian government will nevertheless support continued efforts to promote the universalisation of the Convention, and encourage adherence by states parties to its existing provisions, including effective national implementation measures.

The last review conference of the BWC held in 2002 decided by consensus to meet annually to discuss and promote common understanding and effective action on a set number of useful objectives. These objectives include national measures to implement the Convention; laws and administration; enhanced security of pathogenic micro-organisms and toxins; and establishing sound codes of conduct for scientists working in this area.

Australia takes these commitments seriously and is taking further action in each of these areas. Our BWC obligations have been written into domestic legislation since 1976. But we are currently reviewing our legislation and developing proposals that will tighten controls on biological materials.

We are also examining existing codes of conduct for scientists and technologists with a view to strengthening then in the context of the BWC work program.

The purposes of this Workshop are therefore to bring together experts and responsible officials from around the region to share our respective experiences in giving effect to the BWC and complement the BWC program of work in Geneva. That program of work focuses on national efforts. If we all take steps strengthen national legislation on biosecurity, the BWC will be strengthened. In that way, not only national, but international security will be greatly enhanced.

The Workshop is the first of its kind in the region. I hope that it is not just a one-off event. It would be a useful thing for you to consider how you might follow up this activity in the region between now and the next Review Conference of the BWC – due in late 2006.

The Australian government would support further meetings of this kind, should regional governments find them useful. We would also be happy to offer short courses of familiarisation training on disarmament and arms control issues to officials throughout the region to spread understanding of these issues and their compliance obligations. We can also help in the development of national legislation.

In particular, we are hoping that all countries in our region will be able to report to the sixth Biological Weapons Convention Review Conference, to be held in Geneva in late 2006, that they have made considerable progress in national implementation of the various measures identified at the reconvened session of the fifth Review Conference, As I mentioned earlier, this will be achieved through the:

• Development and enactment of domestic laws;
• Enhancing the security of pathogens and toxins;
• Development and promulgation of codes of conduct for scientists.

By gathering here to progress these issues you are helping to make this region safer and keeping this key instrument rigorous and effective. I commend you and your governments for undertaking this important work.